At the European Windows 7 launch event earlier today, Microsoft showed off this promotional teaser with a count-up of all the previous releases of Windows eventually reaching number seven of course.

To be perfectly clear, I’m no advocate of the “Windows 7 is actually 6.1” nonsense, but one has to point out that a Windows release is clearly missing from this video’s timeline. Yes, that would be Windows Me.

Windows 2000 was a fantastic consumer OS even if it wasn’t marketed as one. It was far better than the Win98 and WinME alternatives of the time, even for gaming.

(Obviously subject to drivers for your hardware at the time, but it worked great on my hardware.)

I think Win2k was the biggest leap forward Windows has ever had and also the least well known. It’s clunky now, of course, but for me it’s the “golden moment” of Windows’ evolution, combining the best bits of Win9x and WinNT into something that, despite all the fear, worked great and without hassle both in the home and in the office.

Windows 7 utter garbage in so many areas, I’ll stick with XP where the Explorer can at least not only look better and but also function better with decent shell extensions. Unlike Winshi7e where its all just gone to epic noob shite!

No Me? Windows Me was essentially Win 98 with a new media features and not much else. It had the original Movie Maker, a new media player, and not much else. It actually wokred well if you installed it fresh. Upgrades were a disaster though. So Win 95/98/Me were essentially point releases of the same product. There was also Win98 SE in there too.

Win Me was also the last release in this old code base (thank goodness). The next release was XP and was based on the much more robust NT/2000 code base.

@BrianHoyt – I don’t think that’s accurate. Maybe you are thinking of NDIS which I believe was introduced in ME. I am fairly certain the same driver model was used through the 9x code stream (which included ME).

Did anyone notice the “Windows 7 kills Snow Leopard” attributed to Gizmodo in the video. I believe it is very misleading to put that in the commercial when the article where this quote was mentioned is http://gizmodo.com/5272999/windows-7-kills-snow-leopard-and-eats-it , written way before both OSs where released and was not even referencing the quality of the OS, just the number of people who are searching for it. Their actual (p)review is much more balanced, and if anything they also have an article which is almost fanboy-praising Snow Leopard (perhaps as a joke) – http://gizmodo.com/5288294/flame-war-snow-leopard-vs-windows-7-fight .
Windows 7 is definitely the best Windows ever but I don’t believe they should have used such a tactic, even because there are many other reviews they could have quoted which praise it legitimately.
That said it could be that there is another “Windows 7 kills Snow Leopard” quote somewhere at Gizmodo which I missed 😉

Aside from that, this is the first actual attempt I’ve seen to justify the name “Windows 7”.
I still don’t really agree with it though.
What about Windows 2000? Me? Or the fact that actually the version number is 6.1? lol

Vista and 7 are more similar than 2000 and XP, yet they get counted as separate major versions while 2K/XP gets lumped together. That’s just nonsense; the name 7 was just a marketing thing and now they’re bending over backwards trying to justify it.

“Windows 7 is actually 6.1″ is no nonsense. That is the internal version number. And the difference between Vista and / is not as big as they want it to sound like. Vista has become much faster over the years, but people still bad mouth it because the memories of that slow first version won’t die. That is why Microsoft want Windows 7 to sound like a whole new OS.

If you compare Vista to Windows 7, the performance is more or less equal. If you take away the results that only give a highly marginal difference (0-2% in both ways), then Vista WINS over Windows 7 in these tests with 9-8.

Both Vista SP2 and Windows 7 are based on that slow first version of Windows Vista… Sure, improvements have been made, but I don’t consider Windows 7 to be that overwhelming groundbreaking new OS that they claim it to be themselves…